Whether your budget is high or low, you’re aware that blog marketing is a must for businesses of every size. Blog writing services are one of the go-to options for companies to keep up with their editorial calendars, but one of the biggest concerns is having the budget to acquire blog writing services in the first place.
While hiring a good blog writer might feel like a significant expense, the truth is that the potential return on investment is astounding.
In fact, 82% of marketers who blog see a positive ROI from their efforts.
Not to mention, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional advertising and generates 3x the amount of leads.
With these eye-popping statistics, it’s no wonder that blog writing services are more popular than ever.
Here is how you can get the most out of your investment.
[wp-svg-icons icon=”coin” wrap=”i”] Creating a Budget: How Much Should You Spend on Blog Writing Services?
There’s no doubt about it—companies are spending big bucks on content marketing and blog writing.
Apple is spending $1 billion on content and the content industry is a whole is projected to be worth $313 billion next year.
The good news is that you don’t need to have a billion or million dollar budget to afford good blog writing services. But it helps to have some guidelines on where to start so you can create a realistic content marketing budget.
According to Content Marketing Institute’s 2018 Benchmarks, companies that were the least successful spent 14% of their budget. Those who were the most successful spent 40%, and the average spending as a whole was 26%.
With this data, your company might find the sweet spot for budgeting between 26%-40%. Remember that you can always begin with a lower (but not too low) budget and increase as time goes on.
For more guidance, the US Small Business Administration recommends that companies making less than $5 million per year spend 7%-8% of gross revenue on marketing.
[wp-svg-icons icon=”lab” wrap=”i”] Spending Formula and Cost per Lead
Once you have a budget in mind, it’s important to think about your projected return on investment. You can look at this a couple of different ways.
First, Business 2 Community gives the following budget formula example of a company with $500,000 in revenue. If you spend 30% on marketing, this puts you at $11,250.
A conservative way to budget by using the following formula:
[$ annual revenue] x 0.075 x 0.3 = [$ annual blog marketing budget]
Another way you can look at it is determining cost per lead.
This chart shows generalized cost-per-lead benchmarks by industry.
From here, you can determine a rough budget by calculating cost per lead x number of leads = [$ blog marketing budget]. This is a very basic concept and the idea is to keep your cost per lead as low as possible. Blog writing is an excellent way to achieve this as it provides some of the best ROI and costs less than other forms of advertising.
So, you have some guidelines on how you should budget for content. But what other components of blog writing services matter in terms of value?
[wp-svg-icons icon=”notebook” wrap=”i”] Be S.M.A.R.T with Your Blog Marketing (and Your Budget)
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is investing in a blog writer without a plan in place. Today, writing a few paragraphs and publishing it to your website is not enough. You need a content strategy to make sure that your blogging is hitting all of your expected benchmarks.
Sadly, this is where many blogging efforts fall short. In fact, 70% of marketers lack to implement a consistent or integrated content marketing strategy at all.
You can imagine the amount of goals that are never accomplished with this approach. You can also imagine the number of bosses that immediately cut any budget for blogging because it “didn’t work.”
The good news is that you don’t have to waste time (or money) with your company blog—but it’ll take some planning to get the job done right.
S.M.A.R.T. is one of the popular approaches that you can use to begin setting goals for your blog. In the blogging tips video below, I briefly explain S.M.A.R.T blog planning:
[wp-svg-icons icon=”location” wrap=”i”] S – Setting Specific Goals
What’s wonderful about blogging is that it can improve your business in so many ways. Whether you’re a startup or an established business, there is likely an area where blogging can bring your business benefits.
These are a few of the most common goals that companies set for their blogs:
- Increasing web traffic/Improve SEO
- Naturally attract backlinks
- Lead generation
- Increasing sales
- Boosting brand awareness
- Market education
- Thought leadership
- Building an email list
Not only is it important to set blogging goals, but it’s also important to assign each blog post to at least one goal category. Creating content that does not fit into one (or more) of your overall goals will likely fall short on performance—resulting in a disappointing ROI.
In my previous blog post, The 5 Fundamentals of Explosive Blog Marketing, I explain in-depth on choosing goal categories and applying it to your content creation process.
[wp-svg-icons icon=”expand-2″ wrap=”i”] M – Measure Your Progress
Thanks to Google Analytics and many other software options (some free, some paid) it’s easier than ever to track the progress of your blog marketing.
Here are some examples of how you can effectively track your blog marketing efforts:
- Increasing web traffic/Improve SEO
- Naturally attract backlinks
- Lead generation
- Increasing sales
- Boosting brand awareness
- Market education
- Thought leadership
- Building an email list
[wp-svg-icons icon=”stats” wrap=”i”] Increasing Web Traffic/Improving SEO
There are a couple of effective programs that you can use to track this data. You’ll need web traffic tracking installed to ensure that your blog marketing and SEO optimization efforts are working.
These are two programs that I personally use and recommend for increasing web traffic and improving SEO:
Free option: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is easy to install to track as web traffic increases, decreases, and pinpointing potential algorithm fluctuations.
With Google Analytics, you can set your preferred date range and find traffic numbers that correlate to that specific date.
The great part is that you can go beyond simple data traffic reporting and dive deep into other metrics.
You can track the number of unique visitors, page views, and average time on site. These metrics matter since they can gauge the effectiveness of your blog content and help you determine if changes are necessary.
For example, if you find that you have a lot of unique page visits and a high bounce rate, it shows that work needs done with your blog content for better ROI.
Paid option: SEMRush
SEMRush tracks web traffic fluctuations just like Google Analytics. This program costs $99 per month to start and I attest that it is worth every cent.
Even though you can get traffic data for free from Google Analytics, there are additional metrics that you can get from SEMRush that you won’t get with free Google traffic tracking.
You can see from this screenshot the SEMRush tells you how much you’d spend on traffic cost for specific keywords if you’d invest in pay-per-click advertising.
Realistically, unless you are Apple, you probably won’t sink $112 million into blog writing services to improve SEO. The good news is that you don’t have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to get good results with blog marketing—and you can do so by using a smart approach on SEO for blog posts.
[wp-svg-icons icon=”users” wrap=”i”] Boosting Brand Awareness
If your goal is to get your brand name in front of more people, you’ll find that blogging can get you there when you’re willing to put in the work.
Just like improving SEO and traffic, tracking is one of the keys to success for brand awareness.
Free option: Google Alerts
Google Alerts is nothing new. However, it’s a simple yet effective tool that can help you keep tabs on brand mentions for your company.
The idea is for Google to email you each time that your brand name is mentioned somewhere on the Internet. Here is how to set up Google Alerts:
Free Option: Twitter Alerts
Twitter is another potential source for keeping tabs on your brand name. It gives you a glimpse into real-time conversations about your company.
You can find Twitter mentions in terms of brand names or someone simply typing out your username. E.g.: Busy Blogs Plus vs. @BusyBlogsPlus. You might also find your brand name in a hashtag, like #BusyBlogsPlus.
Twitter tracking is just about as easy to set up as Google Alerts.
Paid Option: Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is another terrific tracking tool for brand name mentions. It’s $99/month and it gives you the ability to set up alerts for brand mentions.
While this basic feature doesn’t really justify the cost of $99/month, note that Buzzsumo provides a lot of other bells and whistles to enhance your blog marketing. You can compare your brand mentionings against your competitors, export them to a PDF, and download/export the content.
These are just a few tools of the trade that you can use for free or paid subscription. Whichever tool you choose, make sure you’re tracking your progress so you know that you’re getting the best ROI possible.
[wp-svg-icons icon=”calendar” wrap=”i”] A – Set an Achievable Blog Schedule
One of the most popular questions I get from clients is how often should you blog? There is a lot of data on the frequency of blog post publishing. Keep in mind that these blogging tips change in tune to Google’s fluctuating algorithm.
When you’re thinking about setting a blog schedule, remember that blogging is a long-term commitment. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself by trying to blog 8 times per month when you know that you can only swing 4 blog posts. Realizing this before you get busy with blog writing will make you that much more successful.
Not too long ago, quantity was key with blog marketing. Today’s focus is on quality, as Google places a strong emphasis on in-depth, educational content that helps customers solve problems.
A few things to consider when setting a blog schedule:
- Who is your target audience?
- What topics are most important to them?
- What keywords will you use?
- How often will you publish your content?
- How do you plan to promote your content?
[wp-svg-icons icon=”bullhorn” wrap=”i”] R – Relevant Blog Topics Help Achieve Goals
Blog topic ideas are one of the biggest struggles of both B2B and B2C businesses. The good news is that there are many resources available to help you dig into some great blog topics.
Free Option: Quora
Quora is an ideal resource to help find real questions that your customers are asking. The questions on this platform present a prime opportunity to write an answer around that question.
Using Quora is a snap. Simply sign up for an account and type a keyword in the search bar that’s related to your business. It might take some time to sift through the content and find the best questions that fit your blog strategy, but for most industries it’s a goldmine for content ideas.
Note: You can also publish blog content directly on Quora’s platform.
Free Option: Answer the Public
Answer the Public is unique in the way that it displays data. You enter a keyword into its search bar and you’ll get a diagram that looks like this. This is what pops up when I type my own industry, blogging, into the search bar:
Paid Option: BuzzSumo
With its $99/month subscription, you’ll find the most popular and trending topics in your industry under your chosen keyword. You can use these topics as a springboard to craft your own content around these topics while providing even more value to your readers.
[wp-svg-icons icon=”clock” wrap=”i”] T – Successful Blogging Takes Time
With blog marketing, you won’t see success overnight. You can follow all of the blogging tips from the pros and you’ll find that it takes a lot of grit and consistency to get results.
When you want blogging to grow your business, you’ll end up paying for it one way or another. That’s either by investing time into your research, content writing, and promotion—or you can hire blog writing services to take care of the job for you.
[wp-svg-icons icon=”pencil” wrap=”i”] Busy Blogs Plus Brings the Best ROI with Blog Marketing
Our blog writing services go beyond the per-word-count agencies you’ll find online. I specialize in implementing a smart blog strategy combining it with masterpiece content writing. We’ll build your blog strategy from the ground up while providing wow-factor content that’s on-point for your marketing goals.
Explore our custom blog packages to find the perfect fit for your blog strategy:
No spam. Ever.